After about 2 1/2 years, I finally got around to fixing my wristwatch.

Way back when, I accidentally dropped it and when it hit the floor, the second hand popped off, and was rattling around under the crystal. Second hands are so incredibly thin and fragile that I was worried if I kept using it, the second hand might get trapped between the other hands and get bent or jammed up.

So for about 30 months, the watch has been sitting on my workbench, waiting for attention.

Then I found myself going into my watchmaking toolkit as I needed one of the micro screwdrivers, and that’s when I found myself looking at the watch. So as soon as I finished the other project, I got the watch, case wrench, tweezers and loupe, and went to work.

It really didn’t take much time – most of the time I spent was trying to remember how to release the stem. Some of them you have to unscrew a set screw slightly, other ones have a push-release. This one is a push-release.

Then it was pretty straightforward to get the second-hand with the tweezers and press it back onto the spindle thing.

I forget the correct terms. It’s been 5 years since I was into watchmaking, I’ve forgot all the terminology.

But now my watch works again!

Now I’m the sort of person who wears a watch.

Sometimes.

Just so nobody thinks that home camera repair is all fun and wine, there are the occasional FAIL moments.

My Lomo Lubitel 166 was in need of some work – when I got it, it was filthy (“refurbished” my arse) and the Bulb mode did not work. A simple cleaning was easy enough and I was sort of prepared to live without Bulb mode since it didn’t come with a cable release socket anyways. (Though wierdly, it actually came with a cable release.)

The final straw came when I had loaded it up with the second roll of film, then the back flopped open and ruined a couple exposures. At that point, I figured I’d fix the Bulb mode and see about doing something to improve the way the back closed.

Repairing Bulb mode proved to be pretty simple. But putting it back together… well there was the kicker. I could get it back together, but the shutter wouldn’t cock. Or I could get it so the shutter cocked, but it wouldn’t go back together. It was frustrating. I fiddled with it for a few hours then gave up and set it aside for a week or two.

Last night I tried again, but found myself to be still frustrated – I have no idea how they hooked the cocking gear to the winding gear. I can hook them up in a dozen different ways, but none of them work.

In frustration I “removed” one side of the camera, to see if I could get at some of the gears. I got at the gears, but still no luck. The camera body is mainly plastic, and the outer bits were ‘welded’ in place so getting at the gears meant breaking some of the outer casing.

At this stage, it’s pretty much a write-off. All I can do now is scavenge it for parts. Sigh. Well, you can’t win them all. And I did get one roll of film through it. Still… after spending 29 years waiting in a box, it found me, shot one roll of film, then I killed it.

Mind you, a little failure is good now and then, helps to keep us mindful of consequences and helps us learn.

Another day, another camera… I saw this for sale at the online division of my local camera store. I didn’t know much about the Rollei 35 line, but it looked interesting, so I did some reading. I found out it was ’small’, ‘compact’. The B35, introduced in 1969, is small, light, fully manual, and has a selenium powered light meter (no batteries required). It was inexpensive so I went for it.

What all the internet pictures fail to convey is just how small this 40-year-old camera actually is! I was amazed that they had a full-frame manual functional 35mm camera in such a tiny package. It’s just totally adorable! Believe me, it’s smaller than you think.

Rollei B35

The light meter functioned and gave sane readings – after 40 years it still worked! The aperture and shutter seemed to work right, and the lens looked good.

It did have some issues though – it was obvious someone had tried to ‘fix’ it and messed things up somewhat. The leatherette was peeling in areas, and there were blobs of crazyglue where they’d tried to fix it. The top plate was very loose. And the viewfinder was cloudy and dusty.

It proved to be quite easy to remedy everything but the leatherette – after removing the wind lever, there are just two screws to free the top-plate. I suspect someone else undid the two screws (they were very loose) but didn’t know how to remove the wind lever. Once the top plate was off, I went at the viewfinder with q-tips and windex. I got it about 80% clean – there was one bit I couldn’t access because the parts were glued and I didn’t want to risk breaking the glass. It’s an improvement, anyhow. Then it all went back together easily and I made sure it was all tight and sturdy.

Rollei Repairs

So I ran a roll of HP5+ through it to see if it worked as well as I thought it looked. The Triotar lens is only a triplet and some people say it’s not very good, but I was pleased with the results. It did a good job considering I was just guesstimating the focusing (and I suck at guessing distances.)

HP5+, ISO 400, developed in TMax for 6:30 minutes. The quality on the last shot isn’t that great because it’s been heavily cropped.

After all my recent successes, I decided to do some work on one of my new favorites – the Zeiss Ikon Nettar. This camera is 60 years old, made in 1949 it is a medium format 6×6 folding camera. With bellows and everything, it’s a real beauty, and in almost perfect condition! The only problem was the viewfinder was totally fogged up. Not surprising if it’s got 60 years of gunk in it.

Unscrewing the top plate.

Fortunately, cleaning a viewfinder on one of these cameras is a fairly easy task. Just remove the screw that holds down the winding knob, then remove the screw that’s underneath the winding knob. On the other side, there’s one more screw, and then the top plate just lifts right off. The only caveat is to be careful not to lose the two buttons – the shutter release and the opening latch, are ‘loose’ and held in place only by the top plate.

With the top plate off, the front and rear viewfinder lenses are easily accessable. The glass is only held in place by ‘friction’, being pressed into a lightweight metal frame. This means it’s easy to dislodge them if you aren’t careful.

Once I had access to the lenses, I just used a couple q-tips and a drop of windex, to wipe away the grime. Once it was done, the viewfinder was clear as crystal. It was a snap then to just put back the buttons and top plate, then tighten the screws down. Only about 10 minutes for the entire procedure, and now my Zeiss Ikon Nettar is as good as new!

The Nettar without its top plate.

The codeine buzz didn’t last long, so in an attempt to draw my attention away from the unbearable seething agony in my mouth, I decided to have a go at repairing another camera.

Today’s victim subject was my Hanimex Rangefinder. I’ve looked high and low on teh interwebz but have yet to find any more information on this camera. I’m confident that it works like the Hanimex zone focus ZF35, and is almost certainly made by whomever made the ZF35. I have parts of the ZF35 manual, and between that information and what I’d ascertained when I originally disassembled part of the Hanimex, I am confident that a) my RF35 is functionally equivalent, b) the mechanical shutter operates at full speed when there is no battery power, and c) the metering system (when it works) uses an electromagnet to delay the shutter closing.

In other words, the shutter is cocked and released in a fully mechanical fashion. However, there is a small electromagnet (basically a small relay coil) next to an armature which, when released, closes the shutter. This armature has a small steel weight attached. Without any power whatsoever, the armature moves unimpeded and its maximum speed is probably 1/300th of a second. When the small coil is powered, this magnetically holds the armature in place until the current is removed. This delay is what allows the camera to employ slower shutter speeds.

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Hey, how hard can it be, right? Today we’re going to be working on an ‘antique’, a ~37 year old Canonet GIII QL17, mechanical manual-focus rangefinder camera.

First thing is, make sure before you get started that you’re fully prepared. Have all your tools ready, any spare parts or supplies that you’ll need, and for goodness sake, make sure your beer is handy. A clean and tidy well-lit work area is important too, though in a pinch, just shove stuff off to one side of your dimly-lit desk and keep a flashlight handy for when you need some light.

Step two, dive right on in. Cameras are fairly simple things, as you can see in the pictures. Really it’s just a pound of metal and glass. It only seems complicated because they take that pound of metal and make it into about eleventy-million little springs and levers and ratcheting doo-hickeys. At the end of the day though, metal is still just metal, and glass is still just glass. Except when they make it out of some funky rare-earth crystal stuff.

So once the camera is fixed, just put it back together by reversing the disassembly process.

That’s it – it’s just that easy.

Wow it was hard work getting home today! I live very close to the office, under 10km. Normally it takes me just a few minutes – most of my commute is actually spent at the drive-through coffee shop. Lately though… it’s making me crazy. There’s this one major thoroughfare that I don’t even have to drive on, I just cross it. But they’ve been tearing it up, laying it back down again, I don’t know what they’re actually doing. Maybe one side is done and they’re just flipping it over, one bit at a time.

Anyhow, so I’m trying to get home and trying to avoid the major intersections. I came through a residential area, side-streets, to cut across the main road where there’s a set of traffic lights, from one residential area to another. OMG what a mess.

At first I tried to be patient, calm, etc. but the minutes kept ticking past with hardly any movement. I could see a growing line of cars behind me. Eventually the line would scoot ahead a carlength, then stop a while longer. Finally after about a half hour I was near enough to see what was happening.

Whenever the lights went green for us, the construction crew would kick into action and move equipment infront of us. See, they were trying to minimize disruption to the main street, so when the main street had a red light, they’d go out into the intersection and do their thing.

Only, uh, WTF about the rest of the traffic? I mean ok, the lady with the stop/slow sign couldn’t see how huge the backlog of cars was – how could she, when she was so very careful not to turn around and look.

What was happening was now and then, when we had a green light, one or two cars would get a chance to sneak through. Then we’d miss 2 or 3 lights while they were dumping dirt, or pushing dirt, or pointing at dirt that needed to be pushed, or pointing at dirt that needed to be dumped.

WTF goes through their minds? I mean if they were going to effectively close the road, then just close the f-ing road! Don’t let it back up all the way to the next major intersection.

Sheesh!